In telecommunication applications and equipment, digital signal processing is often employed in particular for establishing and maintaining connections and for transmitting voice signals using digital signal processors (DSPs). DSPs are also used for digital encoding and decoding of signals, in particular of voice signals. Predefined processes, called codecs, are accessed for encoding and decoding transmitted signals. Examples of audio codecs are known under the designations G.711, G.722, G.723, G.728, G.729, T.38, etc. and are standardized; among other things, they differ from each other by the required computing performance (so-called performance requirement). A DSP overload occurs if the performance requirement of a codec exceeds the available performance of a DSP. This may occur when a connection is newly assigned to a channel of a DSP by a channel management process running on one of the host processors or by a codec change on a channel as requested by a connection partner. The voice quality of a transmission channel may suffer in such a case or the channel and/or the connection may be interrupted.
In order to avoid overloading the DSPs and the associated connection interruptions and/or poor voice quality, it is known to carry out channel management on the basis of the most computationally intensive codecs. This means that a channel is established only if the DSP intended for this purpose has sufficient capacity to maintain the channel even with the codec that requires the greatest computational performance. The establishment of a connection can then be rejected early on, and a change of codecs, which can be requested by the partner or become necessary due to performance features, is possible at any time.
If a codec with less than the highest computational performance is used at a certain point in the course of the channel management process, then capacities are provided that are not needed at that time. Thus, the DSP is not utilized optimally.
The problem addressed by the present invention is that of providing secure channel management that can avoid overload and at the same time can better utilize the capacity of a DSP, or can better utilize its computational capacity.